


She Seemed Dressed In All Of Me

by wellhereweare



Category: Layton Kyouju Series | Professor Layton Series
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Codependency, Depression, Fluctuating pronouns, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Heavy Angst, New Year's Song Fic Challenge, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Trans Woman Hershel Layton, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28470300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wellhereweare/pseuds/wellhereweare
Summary: Hershel Layton doesn't wake up Xanthe over night. It takes a while.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 4





	She Seemed Dressed In All Of Me

**Author's Note:**

> A songfic for new year's! Vermillion Pt 2 by slipknot, a song I truly love, taken totally out of context and edited to cut down on repetition. (I also added a line at the end so I could end on a slightly happier and admittedly cheesier note lol) This isn't necessarily "canon" for Xanthe, but I wanted to do at least one exploration of her backstory based (very loosely) on some of my experiences. 
> 
> Further triggers warning:  
> Xanthe and Luke's relationship is, again, codependent and can be read as romantic.  
> Mental Health Issues, including depression, self loathing, and negligent as well as intentional self harm.  
> *Dysphoria*  
> Minor transphobia

_  
_ _She seemed dressed in all of me  
_ _Stretched across my shame  
_ _All the torment and the pain  
_ _Leaked through and covered me  
_ _I'd do anything to have her to myself  
_ _Just to have her for myself  
_ _Now, I don't know what to do  
_ _I don't know what to do when she makes me sad_

The days after Luke left were strange, grinding grey things that passed without notice in one long endless haze. Hershel moved as if through fog. It was killing him, being alone again. He’d been accustomed to it once, the mechanical dance of his life alone, but he truly felt now that he’d been gutted and filled up with clockwork. 

He saw himself as something constructed, sometimes. He was a robot, picking up the pieces as he went to build himself into an obscene replica of a person. A gentleman, a scholar, a man, he was those things because he did them, wasn’t he? There were rules, from old books and careful observations, half remembered admonitions as a child. Boys don’t cry, etcetera.

Still, he found himself picking at them like scabs. There was a person on television one day - a man- a woman? She, he decided cautiously after a moment, had been born a man and now was not. He’d never have guessed passing her on the street. She talked about her struggles, about how being a man had always been strange to her. Unnatural, fake, a persona she’d built up, she said, because that’s what she was taught she was supposed to do.

He was transfixed. Stunned, horrified, humiliated to have his heart read to a crowd by a stranger, still he thought about it day and night after that. He wrote letters to Luke and didn’t mention his creeping suspicion or his new nightly research. 

He stood in a poorly lit half bath off the kitchen and stared into his own eyes. He felt, as he often did, that he could see an entirely different person behind them. A woman, he thought now, breathless as his stomach churned. Overlapping monsters, they moved in sync. No, he thought, those aren’t my eyes. They were her glittering black eyes, and he saw all of his sicknesses, all of his ugliness reflected in them.

‘Obviously,’ he thought, feeling the world shift around him. ‘I’m her.’

 _She is everything to me  
_ _The unrequited dream  
_ _A song that no one sings  
_ _The unattainable  
_ _She's a myth that I have to believe in  
_ _All I need to make it real is one more reason  
_ _I don't know what to do  
_ _I don't know what to do when she makes me sad  
_

Finding out she was a woman didn’t affect her life as much as she thought it might, partly because she did what she always did when she found something out about herself. She boxed it up and hid it, except for writing in her journals. Even Luke, who knew the worst of her intimately, she told nothing.

Everyday for a long time, she had woken and slipped on Gentleman Professor Hershel Layton like a suit. She’d only discovered yet another piece of it. An experienced imposter, she thought as she smiled at a student, a coworker, every time she smiled in a day. Nothing really had to change, the same grey life. Still, she found herself looking through women’s clothes as she passed the section.

“I’m looking for a present for my daughter.” A gentleman named Hershel explained to the ladies helping him with her mouth as she shook behind her mask. “We’re about the same size.” No one recognized him until she introduced him, so she thought it might be safe. The ladies giggled and shushed him when he told them, “She takes after me, poor thing.”

‘I do, though,’ she thought, hiding out once more in the bathroom off the kitchen. She found the new blouse would be a perfect fit, if the body beneath it wasn’t quite so misshapen. It was too square, too ugly. The chest was flat, and the belly was not. The face had a strong masculine jaw and tiny eyes. Men don’t cry, of course, but there weren’t any in the flat, so she just sat on the floor and wept until she fell asleep.

 _But I won't let this build up inside of me  
_ _I won't let this build up inside of me  
_ _I catch in my throat, choke  
_ _Torn into pieces  
_ _I won't, no  
_ _I don't wanna be this_  
_I won't let this build up inside of me_  
_She isn't real_  
_I can't make her real_

He threw out the blouse. He put her away, properly this time. She was just words on a page, flashes in his dreams. He worked and wrote letters and slept. He remembered to bathe but not always to eat. It didn’t matter. He figured he could stand to lose the weight.

Luke knew that he was worse than usual, but Hershel had always been melancholic. He just avoided explaining. Luke wrote more but didn’t push. Hershel tried to enjoy it, feeling guiltier than usual. Lying wasn’t usually his most prominent sin.

It was easier to be a relatively handsome man, he knew. Accomplished, respected, he had a comfortable position and a good reputation. He felt like he was coming apart, trying to escape his ill-fitting, unshapely body. Once, he wished he could crack himself open and fix whatever had gone wrong, but now, he wished he could pull the body off, let the bare steel gleam free from the flesh concealing it.

‘I’m quite good with machines,’ he thought deliriously, standing naked from the waist up in front of that same mirror once more. It was very late or very early. He wasn’t sure if he’d already had the razor in his hand or if he’d managed the endless fog outside the flat to buy one. He couldn’t remember. He held it in a shaking hand between his collar bones. 

His bare arms were scarred, but that had been a long time now. Anyway, this was different. It wasn’t punishment; it was necessary, medical. He just had to clear away the meat. He cut down his front an inch, and blood welled up, spilled over. He dropped the razor into the sink. The pain dragged him out of the mist in his mind, left him shaking and horrified.

“I can’t… I can’t...” He chanted to himself, herself. ‘Who am I,’ wondered the person that wore a body named Layton. 

_(I can make her real)_

She didn’t have a name or anyone who knew her. She was alone, in a way he wasn’t, clinging self consciously to her mask in public, but she was starting to know herself. Disassembling the person she used to be, used to wear, took time. Many of the things she collected she had learned to genuinely love, like archaeology. Some she clung to, helplessly. She wasn’t ready to get rid of the hat, not without Luke here. It was too much. 

She loved oversized jumpers and sweatpants, "women’s" television and cars. Assigning herself readings, she worked her way through everything in Gressenheller’s library about women’s struggles, and she found herself apologizing regularly for her behavior. She built herself again, correctly, in little ways.

Through all of it, she wondered about how Luke might react. One day, she would have to introduce herself to Luke again, properly this time. And slowly, glacially, the chance crept closer. He would be coming home soon.

‘Some things have changed since last you were home,’ she warned him, in the last letter before he would set off, ‘But I hope they are changes you’ll look on kindly.’ She stopped to pin an overgrown curl out of her face. It wasn’t too long yet, but she wasn’t sure whether to cut them or let her hair grow out completely. ‘I think I’m much better for them, honestly.’

**Author's Note:**

> I imagine, for as confident as she sounds, she panics and writes a letter instead, for him to read when he gets home. He's fine with it, more than fine in fact, and encourages her in her transition. And one day, Xanthe looks in the mirror, only to see a beautiful older woman smiling back at her.


End file.
